Cooking a wonderful meal is an art. An act of love. An act of grace. A
gift that affirms and gives life—not only does it nurture those who
partake of the meal; it also feeds the soul of the creator. These are
lessons Gina learns from her mother, daughter of an unfortunate French
chef.
Gina is a young woman born to poor parents, a nobody keen to taste
life outside the world she was born into. A world that exposes her to
fascinating people gripped by dark motives. Her passion for cooking is
all she has to help her navigate it.

She gets lucky when she’s chosen to cook at a Michelin-starred
restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area where customers belong to a
privileged class with money to spare for a dinner of inventive dishes
costing hundreds of dollars. In this heady, scintillating atmosphere,
she meets new friends and new challenges—pastry chef Marcia, filthy rich
client Leon, and Brent, a brooding homicide detective. This new world,
it turns out, is also one of unexpected danger.

Can the lessons Gina learned from her mother about cooking and life
help her survive and thrive in this other world of privilege, pleasure,
and menace?

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Prologue

I’m alive. I’m
dead. I’m in-between. In that limbo where my vital signs hover just above
death. I rise above my body and look down on it, lying on a gurney. Hospital
staff are rushing me along the brightly-lit hallway to the operating room. One
of them holds an oxygen mask on my face. Another, a bag of intravenous fluid
connected to my veins by a tube.

I’m not ready
to die yet. These good people anxious to rescue me don’t know that my resolve
is the only thing that is keeping me alive. No, I’m not ready to die—I’ve only
just begun to live. I have yet to prove to myself, to the world, that I have
what it takes to prevail.

My family—now
on their way to the hospital—doesn’t know yet exactly what happened to me. And
except for one detective, neither do the police. I see him now by the foot of
the gurney, keeping pace with the nurses. He’s scowling, his lips pressed into
a grim line.

A tall, taut,
and solitary man, he has deep-set gray eyes clouded by too many images of
violent death and a lower lip that hangs perpetually open in disgust or
despair. So much darkness he has already seen in his thirty odd years in this
world. He needs to piece together the facts that constitute the attempt on my
life, events that may have led to it, and various fragments of my past to
understand what brought me to this point.

The first time
I met him, I fell in love with him. There was something primal about him, some
paternal, animalistic instinct to save hurt or fallen victims. Like me, maybe.
It gave him power and it made him irresistible to me.

But fate is
fickle. It teases. It entices. One day, something quite ordinary happens to
you. Yet, you sense that that ordinary something can change your life. Not
necessarily for something better, but for something new. Fate is dangling
before you the promise of a world that, before then, was totally out of your
reach. How can you not seize it?

Now, of course,
I see the end of that promise. And it’s not where I want to be.

It’s tragic,
don’t you think, that the end of that promise should be right here on a gurney,
with me fighting for my life? It certainly is not what I hoped for.

How could it
end this way? I embraced life, took chances, but half-dead on this gurney, I
wonder: Am I paying with my life? But, like I said. I’m not ready to die yet.

Evy Journey, SPR (Self Publishing Review) Independent Woman Author
awardee, is a writer, a wannabe artist, and a flâneuse who, wishes she
lives in Paris where people have perfected the art of aimless roaming.
Armed with a Ph.D., she used to research and help develop mental health
programs.
She’s a writer because beautiful prose seduces her and existential
angst continues to plague her despite such preoccupations having gone
out of fashion. She takes occasional refuge by invoking the spirit of
Jane Austen to spin tales of love, loss, and finding one’s way—stories
into which she weaves mystery or intrigue.